You may have noticed the occasional slowdowns on our website. I just found out the reason for these slowdowns and I am pissed. Some idiot (or idiots) on our server are doing some unholy things (like using a persistent database connection without bothering to close it properly) to the database server. I just logged on to the server and the load average (the average number of programs requesting CPU attention) was 40!!! Yes, four-zero. That is friggin insane!!! I noticed that there were hundreds of MySQL processes spawning all over the place.

Thankfully our webhost is smart enough to rectify the situation without my involvement (i.e. me having to yell at them to log on to the server and restart the MySQL service), but nonetheless, this is an annoyance. I think I will write a small script that will log the load averages on this system, and if I notice a regular trend, I will present it to the staff here in a form of a complaint.